Celtic

Celtic

, Keltic

a branch of the Indo-European family of languages that includes Gaelic, Welsh, and Breton, still spoken in parts of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Brittany. Modern Celtic is divided into the Brythonic (southern) and Goidelic (northern) groups

Muirdach's Cross at Monasterboice. Contemporary carved Celtic crosses almost invariably signify a burial place, while the early freestanding or high crosses, some of which are more than 1,200 years old, were positioned as meeting places, often within a Celtic monastic settlement. Fortean Picture Library.

Celtic

(religion, spiritualism, and occult)

Long before Rome conquered all of Europe, the people known as Celts (known by the Greeks as Keltoi) lived and practiced complex polytheistic religious traditions, including Druidism, from Britain and Ireland to Spain, France, southern Germany, and all the way to central Turkey. But they had no written language. Until modern archaeology began to reveal the depths of their culture, all that was known about them came from folklore, oral history, and Roman writers, particularly the quite prejudiced work of Julius Caesar (The Gallic War), Polybius, and Strabo. Caesar first spoke about Druids—intellectuals, judges, diviners, and mediators with the gods. But Celtic religion was widespread, and it varied from land to land. Lugh (the "shining light"), Teutates ("god of the tribe"), Andastra, Belenus, Artio ("the bear"), Camulos, Cernunnos ("the horned one," lord of the animals), and Vasio all had their followings. As is the case with many indigenous religions, gods had their own locations. A god of the grove sacred to one tribe might be recognized by another tribe but not worshiped, because he or she didn't live nearby. Instead, this other tribe would tend to worship the god of the lake near where they lived.

Celtic religious practice points out an important theological truth. When gods or spirits arise within the context of a particular place, the people connect with their environment and treat it accordingly. Indigenous people who worship in this manner, whether they are European Celts, Japanese Shinto, or American Indians, know that their environment is their cathedral. They live in their church, the home of their god. This kind of connection cements the bond between the land and the people. To cut down the sacred grove of the Druids, to kill the buffalo of the Dakota people, or to strip-mine a Cherokee mountaintop is religious blasphemy. Indigenous religion cannot be transported to another place. Missionaries cannot carry that religion with them to indoctrinate a new culture.

People of Jewish, Christian, or Islamic traditions often failed to understand this point of view. And when they did understand it, they usually exploited it. A people cut off from the "ground of their being," their god, are a defeated people. Julius Caesar understood. When he burned the Druid sacred groves and toppled the standing stones, he tore the soul out of the Celtic people, and with it their will to resist. Celtic religion went underground, practiced by old women who remembered herb lore and snatches of forgotten prayers and rituals. It was found in men's secret societies and existed in overgrown roadside shrines in the hollow hills of dim legend and folklore.

Only now, through the patient work of archaeologists, are we beginning to discover how much was lost. And who is to say whether the terrible record of environmental catastrophe in Western civilization is not a result of practicing religion in a way that separated humans from, rather than connected them to, the land they call home?

Celtic

languages of the Indo-European family. They include Gaulish, Celtiberian, Irish, Manx, Gaelic (Scottish), Welsh (Cymric), Cornish, and Breton. The Gaulish languages were extinct by the fifth century A.D.; Celtiberian, spoken in the western and central Iberian Peninsula, died out somewhat earlier. Cornish was last spoken at the end of the 18th century. Manx is spoken by only a few people living on the Isle of Man (Great Britain).

The Celtic languages are usually divided into three groups— Continental (Gaulish and Celtiberian), Brythonic (Welsh, Cornish, and Breton), and Goidelic (Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx). The Continental and Brythonic branches are related to the P-Celts, and the Goidelic branch is related to the Qu-Celts, who preserved the consonant *qu. The disintegration of the Brythonic branch into separate languages took place in the sixth through eighth centuries and of Goidelic, in the 12th and 13th centuries. Inscriptions in Gaulish and Celtiberian indicate their archaic character.

In the modern Celtic languages, as a result of accentual factors, the final syllables have been dropped. In Irish the case system has been partially preserved. Differences in the position of stress led to an opposition in the forms of the verb in Old Irish. In the modern Celtic languages, word order in a sentence is fixed as predicate—subject—object. But in the oldest examples of Irish the verb may also be in final position.

Studies, especially by the Irish scholar O. Bergin, the American scholar C. Watkins, and W. Meid of the Federal Republic of Germany, have shown that many characteristics of Celtic languages formerly considered to be the result of the influence of a substratum (for example, in the works of the German scholar J. Pokorny and H. Wagner of Switzerland) may be regarded as archaisms. Thus, the phenomenon of infixation and suffixation of pronouns has exact parallels in Hittite, Tocharian, Lithuanian, and other Indo-European langages. Numerous alternations of initial consonants in words in the Celtic languages originated in the course of what has been called the accentual revolution (changes in the stress system) during the fifth through seventh centuries A.D. and took on important syntactical functions.

Celticism is relevant not only to the study of the construction of a national identity or the establishment of national literatures, it is also a means by which these same literatures can be more cosmopolitan, as Leerssen emphasizes when he claims that it helps them to overcome the everpresent centre-periphery polarity: "for the story of Celticism is more than the sum of Gaelic, Welsh and Breton stereotypes and nationalism, more than the sum of the peripheries' relations with their respective centres: it is also the story of these regions' sense of ethnic interrelatedness as 'Celts', and of the contacts between these peripheries mutually" (18).

Dennis and the Tohunga have an appropriated indigeneity, fashioned from Romantic primitivism, transposed Celticism and Maori dispossession, which enables them to negotiate with the uncanny, tapu' and unsettled aspects of the landscape.

Depending on the form in which they happened to come across it, readers of the 1890s could have found a judiciously 'literary' celebration of the West of Ireland uneasily entangled in an otherwise hostile 'political' portrayal of its destitution, or a short lyric asserting the new purist imperatives of a young group opposed to the English poetic establishment, or a poetic accompaniment to an illustration of an ancient Irish legend, or a particularly clear expression of Arnoldian Celticism, or an especially 'fine', but also fortunately topographical, example of the latest achievements in the tradition of Irish poetry in English.

The second depicts their creation of homelands in Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and Brittany after they had been driven from the Continent, except for a few scattered pockets, and the subsequent 11th-century invasion of the British isles by the Normans, virtually ending the Golden Age of Celticism.

There is also one Scottish writer, James Macpherson, who if he did not write about Ireland provided, in his largely concocted "translations" from Gaelic manuscripts, a kick-start to the cult of Celticism that was to effect conceptions of Ireland so profoundly.

The two worlds are actively reproduced in By the Black Stream: the Celticism of 'The wind of the Sid', 'the Web of Dream', the contrivances of 'Leifer' for 'rather' and versions of 'Donnchadh Mor O Dalaigh', the 'chaunt-rann' of a singer, the figure of Sweeney and other mythological presences such as Deirdre and Brendan.

What she brings to these discussions is a fresh and provocative interest in Gaelic languages; specifically, she contextualizes Arnold's and Renan's Celticism within a context of "Pale/Fringe diglossia" that enables a more precise critique of the racialist rationales for cultural difference so prominent in their work.

In their introductory piece, the editors never question the existence of Celts as peoples; and their association of Celtic languages with material culture, social organization and art, with little justification for this stance, either betrays a complete lack of awareness, or a denial of a, by now, well-developed critique of Celticism and Celtic Society (Champion 1987; Cellis 1994; Fitzpatrick 1991; 1996; Hill 1989; 1993; Merriman 1987; Renfrew 1996).

All content on this website, including dictionary, thesaurus, literature, geography, and other reference data is for informational purposes only. This information should not be considered complete, up to date, and is not intended to be used in place of a visit, consultation, or advice of a legal, medical, or any other professional.